TIME TO JOIN THE TIMES moved in with him, and never used the return portion of her ticket. After graduating from Tufts, in 1974, Arthur began his journalistic training in North Carolina, as a general- assignment reporter on the Raleigh Times. North Carolina was considered a breeding ground for good journalists, and Punch knew the Daniels family, who owned the city's two newspapers. Gail, meanwhile, had enrolled in the graduate school of journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Arthur was "absolutely, totally green," Mike Yopp, who was then the managing editor, recalled. "Can you imagine anyone who can't spell 'hate'?" Harold Muddiman, the city editor, laughed as he handed Yopp a page of Arthur's copy in which "hait" appeared twice. Like the paper's other cub re- porters, Arthur made a hundred and fifty dollars a week. He rode to the office on a Kawasaki 900 motorcycle. Only his Porsche indicated that he had access to a grander style of life than that of his friends. Arthur and Gail were married in Topeka, in May, 1975. The couple dis- couraged conventional gifts like china and silver, and instead of attending a traditional rehearsal dinner the guests gathered on the Greggs' lawn for a drunken game of volleyball. At the wedding, it was the groom, not the bride, who wore white: white pants, a white belt, and a white tuxedo shirt, open at the neck. Gail appeared in a sleeveless jade dress. In 1976, Punch ar- ranged reporting jobs in London for his son and daughter-in -law-Arthur with the Associated Press Gail with United Press International. Arthur got around on a Triumph Àw Tiger motorcycle, com- plete with a sidecar, and he often visited the Times' London bureau dressed in black leather and smok- , ing a pipe. "I don't think wi-: any of us viewed him as the heir to Punch," Mar- ian Underhill, the office manager, recalled. "He was quite confident, but he looked like such a kid." Punch's performance as a foreign correspondent had been little more than desultory, but Arthur, during his two years overseas, proved himself to be a genuine reporter. In June, 1977, he covered an attack on gunmen who had hijacked a train and taken hostages in Assen, Holland. Because he was the only correspondent in the inner security perimeter, his eyewitness account of Dutch commandos storming the train was quoted in a front-page story in the Times. When he came home in the fall of 1978, he felt "secure" about his reporting skills, he told us. "It was time for me to join the Times." ARTHUR started out as a general- .r\.. assignment reporter in the paper's Washington office, and there Punch, in his understated way, encouraged the bureau chief: Bill Kovach, to look out for his son. Soon Arthur was asking Kovach to explain how and why he had instituted certain policies. "Kovach was just a wonderful boss," Arthur recalled. "He really focussed on developing peo- ple." In Arthur's own mind-if not in anyone else's quite yet-he was no longer the journeyman reporter he had been in Raleigh and in London but was . . now an executIve traJ.nee. Jokes about him had preceded his ar- rival in the Washington bureau; re- porters took to calling him "young Arthur" and "Pinch"-the latter a name '. ." {;}%h 2 '::IT' · "/;(,J,: ,,'6 "Ç"'::: - ' " . ''lLÄ -,.." "A, .. " :j7'T i:: , : r '%J1 , j !;" -)?gp !! ;.'; '_::..' 'i., 1fr:,:, 1J:':-,:" ::P' :>... . .-' : ,..,":),:",...._"", Ir "J [' :t' .... .::. ";: \ "" , ': , ': - ':.::1"", "'.$ i.. :. ",,,,,:'} ;1,; t', '\ fdwùt .\}", ,,:' \ï ".!::-:":-: :--: : .:!L,:, "'ttw.......... .:{-" ',Ij :;-;::x -:-. !-?:,-,,; ?I ",:- "",.., '.', '<', !'-,r dJ/& '''''L''- ... .. . . .n. un. _ _ u __ n ",ti " " '..,<* J-:k ! 57 he despised. "A man deserves his own nickname, and 'Pinch' is clearly my father's name, twisted," he said. Soon, however, he was at the center of a small clique of up-and-coming young Times reporters. Chief among them was an economics reporter named Steven Rattner. Along with five or six other reporters in the bureau, Arthur and Rattner formed a kind of brat pack. Kovach warned his protégé that he was making a mistake in consorting with such an exclusive group, but Arthur refused to distance himself from his friends. Later, after he became deputy publisher, Arthur took Kovach's advice to heart and made it a point not to fraternize with his old friends on the paper. In the spring of 1981, Arthur, Gail, and their infant son, Arthur Gregg, moved to New York; once again, he found himself on general assignment. His ambition had been to arrive as an assistant metropolitan editor, but the paper's national editor, Dave Jones, persuaded him that so senior a title would undermine his credibility in the newsroom. "How many times do I have to pay my dues?" Arthur com- plained. "One more time," Jones as- sured him. The following January, Arthur was in fact made an assistant metropolitan editor-his first real management posi- tion. He adopted the habit of walking Ni\F '''-<\' :C; - f: .' t ;t, " Ji ;:."- ;" "- - . .. ' i 1 - .:_";: "=:::e." - þ > ,<,' < '>> -. '''' : ,t:::' , k , ->' _\ t"1 -- , '"v,\,hé i, ' I r & t 'i -::=:.;1 j'li; -i :t- : ;;;'TY . jP/144